Reading the Epistle to the Romans

One of the advantages of being trained as a biblical scholar and then leaving the field, in large measure, for more than 20 years, is that upon returning I come to the biblical texts with fresh eyes and loads of different questions than in my earlier professional days. In those days, I was moved by the questions of the "guild" of New Testament scholars, such as identifying Paul's opponents in his letters, Paul and the Jewish law, the Lucan portrait of Paul in Acts, etc. But now, unencumbered by any need to align my reading or my interests in Romans with any particular "school" or group of scholars, and also less interested in having scholarly questions guide my own interests, I come back to Romans "fresh," and I find myself noticing things that I never previously noticed. Thanks to an excellently-taught class on Romans at my local congregation, I have dived back into the text and the world of Romans. In a word, I have found that Romans, rather than being the most complex and difficult of Paul's letters, is actually pretty straightforward, as long as you realize a few basic points. The purpose of this essay is to lay out those points.

I. Paul's Approach--Driven by Experience

The first impression one usually gets upon reading Romans is that this is a highly systematic and complex work, driven primarily by huge concepts (e.g., justification, sanctification, glorification, the law, etc.) that Paul deftly explains. In fact, Paul's entire approach in Romans is driven by his Damascus-road experience, recorded in Acts 9, 22, 26. That is, Paul interpreted his arresting vision on the Damascus road as a visitation of Christ to him, as a confirmation of the truth of the message of the Gospel. Since this new thing is true, the "old thing," to which he had cleaved for his previous life, must be false. His argument is, in my judgment, as simple as that. Thus, his old faith--his Jewish faith, must, in some sense, be "false." Rather, then, than "arguing it out" and having the stronger concept "win," Paul has decided that because of the power of his experience, every category he held dear must be re-examined and rejected.

II. The Problem with Experience-Based Theology

The major difficulty with experienced-based theology is that your hearers/readers likely do not share the experience that you say is foundational for you and perhaps for the entire new faith that you describe. Thus, when Paul, througout Romans, re-evaluated traditional Jewish concepts in the light of his new experience, a Jewish person without the same kind of "Damascus road" experience would likely say, "Well, Paul, I see what you are doing--letting your experience dictate what not only is true for you but must also be true for us. But, Paul, this is an act of intellectual arrogance and overreaching. Your experience leads you to make all kinds of statements describing your former life and my life that aren't true."

III. The Creation of the Jewish "Straw Man"

The primary way that Paul overreaches is through his broadbrush condemnation of Judaism as not simply a law-based religion, but one that is defined by law to the exclusion of faith. That is, Paul creates a Jewish straw man that is a product of what he needs Jews to be--clinging to outmoded forms of worship and legal observance. It is obvious to me, after returning to Romans in 2011, that Paul is arguing like an attorney--trying to bolster his case and denigrate the other side. You never look to such an attorney to provide an accurate description of the thing he says is inadequate.

IV. Paul Paints Himself into Intellectual Corners

Paul creates immense problems for himself by arguing from personal experience and then trying to generalize his experience to all (i.e., all must have experiences of faith, rather than be observers of law). The two problems he creates are an inability to explain what role Judaism played in "God's plan" in the first place and his inability to develop a coherent and convincing rationale of why Christian faith should have any "legal" component--i.e., obedience. In fact, I would argue that because of Paul's basic ambivalence on the role of ethical conduct in a person's justification or salvation, he ends up developing a very weak Christian ethic or Christian praxis. In contrast, both Judaism and Islam, the other "Abrahamic" religions, devote extensive attention to proper moral conduct as a religious person. But because Paul puts so much emphasis on grace and justification by grace through faith, he isn't really in a position to develop a rich Christian ethic---other than the indistinct, and somewhat unhelpful, urgings to love one another and bear with each other.

Conclusion

The older I get the more flimsy Paul's argument in Romans appears to me. Don't get me wrong. It is elegant, articulately presented, rhetorically powerful, emotionally satisfying and aggressively presented. Yet, it was driven by an experience he had that others didn't...and it basically wants to make that experience, or something like it, normative for the new religion. But Paul does so only at a great cost--the cost of mischaracterizing Judaism, overreaching in his argument, having a very weak ethical program, and being unable to give a compelling justification why I don't just don't "continue to sin that grace may abound" (cf. Romans 6:1). His argument leads to this position--which he vehemently denies. But, Christian antinomianism, in my judgment, is a legitimate response to Paul's doctrine of justification by faith.

Thus, rather than being a dispassionate theological treatise on the full scope of faith, Romans is an experimental work that tries to handle concepts that defy easy categorization (such as law...). That Paul wasn't successful in explaining it all is not really a criticism; no one else has convincingly put for a theory of the role of biblical law in Christian faith. But in 2011, as a mature man, I look at Paul with some amazement without being persuaded--I am amazed at the range of his passion and rhetorical power; I am not persuaded of the central premise of his work.

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